Summary of the 9/11 Euro-Tour and Media
Coverage
JIMMY WALTER REOPEN 9-11 TOUR
MADRID, VIENNA, LONDON, MANCHESTER,
ROME
By Webster G. Tarpley
Rome, June 10, 2005 - The second phase of the Jimmy Walter Reopen
9/11 tour of Europe has scored new breakthroughs in Spain,
Austria, Great Britain, and Italy, advancing the cause of an
International Truth Commission to evaluate the official version
and to investigate the reality of these attacks. The tour was
made up of two teams of speakers: the red team featured Painful
Questions author Eric Hufschmidt, American Free Press reporter
Chris Bollyn, North Tower hero and 9/11 Hispanic Victims'
Association president William Rodriguez, and philanthropist Jimmy
Walter. The blue team, which subsumed 9/11 health, pollution, and
environmental issues, included Kennedy assassination researcher
Lisa Pease, 9/11 humanitarian volunteer Rachel Hughes, lawyer
Phil Berg, filmmaker Penny Little, Canadian media critic Barrie
Zwicker, and historian Webster Tarpley.
In Madrid, Jimmy Walter and WTC North Tower hero William
Rodriguez met with the association of families of the victims of
the March 11, 2004 train bombings in a ceremony at the memorial
park dedicated to those events. Walter and Rodriguez were also
thanked by a Moroccan Islamic association. A 20 minute long,
highly positive interview with Rodriguez was broadcast by the
nationwide first program of Spanish National Television in its
early morning news and talk show. Rodriguez was also on Radio
Nacional de Espańa. EFE, the main Spanish wire service, put out
a wire of an interview with Rodriguez which was printed in
numerous Spanish dailies and may also have appeared in Latin
America, where EFE is widely distributed. Rodriguez also spoke on
Radio Ser, a popular Madrid station. The Madrid meeting was also
attended by a group of expatriate Americans who committed to
forming an ITC organizing committee in the Spanish capital. Jimmy
Walter told the Madrid gathering that he is now living
permanently in Europe.
VIENNA
Jimmy Walter commented to the Vienna audience about the meetings
with the Madrid victim families and the Moroccans. He pointed out
that the March 11 train bombing families had also called for an
international panel to determine the truth of what had actually
happened. In New York City, he stressed, the terrorists had
assistance from inside the US government. The Madrid March 11
families are right that the train bombings there deserve the same
close scrutiny we want 9/11 to get from the International
Commission. Originally Spanish Prime Minister Aznar had accused
the Basque terror group ETA of being responsible. Aznar was
repudiated by the Spanish voters, but is the Spanish government
now just going to another scapegoat in the form of al Qaeda? The
US Kean-Hamilton 9/11 commission investigated nothing, explained
nothing. Seven of the alleged Arab hijackers are alive and well
and living in the Middle East, but they continue to be carried on
the perpetrators' list. As for the Pentagon, how could a 40-meter
wide airplane disappear into a 6-meter wide hole? There was no
Boeing 757 at the Pentagon. If the FBI wants us to believe their
story, let them release the surveillance camera tapes from the
hotels and gas stations in the area, which they have confiscated
and never released. What are they hiding? The Pentagon did
everything they could to smear Thierry Meyssan, but the fact
remains that the hole in the wall is far too small, said Walter.
Walter also warned again of the danger of new terror attacks
before the end of this year. Bush and Cheney had promised during
the election campaign that there would be no military draft, no
conscription. But now the US Army is no more than six months away
from breakdown because nobody is enlisting as a volunteer any
more. Ford and General Motors are bankrupt, with their debt
reduced to junk bond status. Bush's personal approval rating is
at 42% and falling, while about two thirds of Americans are now
in favor of wrapping up the Iraq war and getting out. Bush is a
war criminal. With the Patriot Act, we have Orwell's 1984
nightmare twenty years later, said Walter.
The Vienna gatherings were the largest of the tour. A first
evening drew about 800, including two hundred who viewed the
procedures on television sets in an overflow room at the Austria
Center. A second evening was attended by over 650. A
well-attended DVD screening brought the total close to 2,000.
Canadian TV producer Barrie Zwicker was interviewed by the
Austrian press agency APA, whose correspondent exhibited the
usual phobias about conspiracy theories. Walter and Webster
Tarpley were fairly and objectively interviewed by the FM radio
station Kronen-Hit, the radio voice of the Kronen Zeitung, the
largest tabloid newspaper in the country and,
according to one reckoning, the daily paper with the highest
circulation in proportion to population anywhere in Europe.
Kronen Zeitung and other papers had carried advertising
publicizing the lectures and film showings of the tour.
Speaking at the two evenings in Vienna was Thomas Meyer, the
leading 9/11 expert of Switzerland. Meyer is the editor of Der
Europäer, a monthly magazine which carries the best 9/11
coverage available in the German-speaking world. Meyer is the
author of a study of 9/11 which appeared in German during 2004,
and has more recently been published in English translation as
Reality, Truth, and Evil: Facts, Questions and Perspectives on
September 11, 2001 (Forest Row UK: Temple Lodge, 2005). Meyer
noted that the official 9/11 myth relies heavily for its
plausibility on the Pearl Harbor myth of an unprovoked surprise
attack by Japan. He documented this reliance with references to
the Project for a New American Century, Zbigniew Brzezinski's
Grand Chessboard, and other pre-9/11 neocon literature. Meyer
also linked the struggle against the oligarchical European Union
draft constitution, which had just been rejected in France, with
the 9/11 issue. Meyer pointed out that proposed draft states that
European defense could only be conducted in the framework of
NATO, an absurdity for a country like Austria, which became
officially neutral when the postwar occupation ended in 1955,
which is not a member of NATO, and has no plans to become one.
Meyer referred to the work of Daniele Ganser, who teaches at the
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich, one of the
world's top engineering schools. Ganser has just published NATO's
Secret Armies, which includes material on Gladio, the NATO
stay-behind network in Italy. As Ganser explains in an interview
in the current issue of Der Europäer, it is established beyond
any doubt that Gladio engaged in domestic terrorism in order to
weaken the Italian communists and the trade unions. Why, asked
Meyer, should this murderous track record not be taken into
account when deciding whether a NATO defense monopoly ought to be
written into the European constitution? In conclusion, Meyer
cited an uncannily prophetic 1916 remark by the German author and
lecturer Rudolph Steiner that some time around the year 2000 an
order would go forth from the United States attempting to outlaw
critical thinking all over the world. This order, said Meyer, has
indeed been issued in the form of the Bush regime's attempt to
suppress criticism of the absurd official version of 9/11.
LONDON AND MANCHESTER
In London, the events were prepared by a series of ads in the
major dailies, as well as in neighborhood papers in Camden Town,
King's Cross, and elsewhere. Two London programs of presentations
and debate drew about 1,200. On June 3, a screening of three 9/11
DVDs at a cinema in Leicester Square was attended by upwards of
350. Additional DVD screenings are ongoing. The London event of
Friday June 4 at the Friends' Meeting House near Russell Square
was chaired by the progressive actress Susanna York. It was
attended by about 600 people. An earlier London event had also
drawn 600.
The Friday London meeting was addressed by David Shayler, the
MI-5 domestic counter-intelligence whistleblower who is appealing
a six-month prison sentence for violating the Official Secrets
Act with his revelations about collusion between the British
foreign intelligence organization MI-6 and al Qaeda. "MI-6
is in bed with al Qaeda," Shayler told the crowd. He related
how he was working on domestic counterintelligence for MI-5 in
the mid-1990s when he was contacted by his opposite number from
MI-6. The MI-6
man told him that a known member of al Qaeda and close associate
of Osama Bin Laden had walked into the British Embassy in Tunis
with a proposal to assassinate the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.
Shayler thought at first that this was simply a case of MI-6
playing James Bond. But in March 1996 he had become aware of MI-6
documents showing that MI-6 had indeed been involved in an
assassination attempt against Qaddafi with the participation of
the al Qaeda member in question. Qaddafi had not been killed, but
a
number of innocent bystanders had been. MI-6 also violated
British procedures by failing to secure the approval of the
Foreign Office for an overseas covert operation. Shayler was
appalled: "I joined MI-5 to fight terrorism, not to be a
part of it," he stated. In July 1998 Shayler alerted the
Tony Blair government to what had happened, and also went public
with what he had learned. These revelations came in the midst of
Tony Blair's initial honeymoon, and they were widely ignored. The
then Foreign
Secretary, Robin Cook, said that Shayler's charges were pure
fiction, and this line was parroted by the UK press. Later a
document was leaked by person or persons unknown which confirmed
that MI-6 had indeed paid al Qaeda in Libya for an unsuccessful
December 1995 hit on Qaddafi. According to this document, an MI-6
agent was involved, and MI-6 knew the modus operandi of the
attack in advance. Shayler's statement was confirmed, but the UK
intelligence agencies have insisted to this day that his story
was fantastic.
Also present at the London meeting was Shayler's fellow MI-5
veteran Annie Machon, the author of Spies, Lies, and
Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 and the Shayler Affair (Sussex UK: The
Book Guild, 2005), a book which tells the story of how these two
whistleblowers met in the MI-5 offices and came to understand the
many rogue operations that were going on in the British
intelligence community, which is still the most sophisticated in
the world in many respects.
Shayler said that he considered the attempted assassination of
Qaddafi, followed by the creation of an al Qaeda regime in Libya,
as an early attempt at a new Pearl Harbor, more than 5 years
before 9/11. If al Qaeda had taken over oil-rich Libya, he
explained, this would have offered the US and UK regimes a
perfect pretext for an invasion, with the seizure of the oil
fields as a by-product.
"I look at information, not conspiracy theories," said
Shayler. "Don't believe the press," he warned,
elaborating that MI-6 is legally allowed to conduct what are
called information operations. These are supposed to consist of
planting stories favorable to the UK, but often turn out to be
stories favorable to MI-6 and its line on the issues. "I was
in counter-terrorism," said Shayler, adding that he had
worked on the Pan Am Lockerbie crash and also on the Irish
Republican Army in the 1990s. "I look at 9/11 and the first
thing I see is that there was no forensic investigation. There
has been no effort at truth. Look also at the total lack of a
serious investigation of the financial operations around 9/11,
including the put options on airline stocks. "In Watergate,
the motto was to follow the money, but not for 9/11" said
Shayler. "The authorities don't
want the truth."
He noted that Ramzi Bin Yussef had revealed to the police in 1993
that new attacks using aircraft were coming. Yussef had made
clear the modus operandi of the coming attacks - airplanes. This
had been underlined by the story of a Moroccan source in the
summer of 2001. Just before 9/11, the FBI and other agencies
intercepted messages relating to the 9/11 attacks, but did
nothing. However, top Pentagon officials called off their travel
plans on 9/11, so there was something more at work than pure
incompetence. Shayler also recalled that the FBI managed to block
and ignore the Phoenix memorandum on Arabs in flight schools and
the attempts by Minneapolis agents to arrest Zacharias Moussawi
until it was too late. The FBI is also continuing to block the
publication of a book by Robert Wright, in which Wright tells how
his anti-terror investigations were sabotaged. The FBI has been
exposed by much Congressional testimony.
SHAYLER: FROM LIHOP TO MIHOP
"I was LIHOP," said Shayler, referring to the school of
thought about 9/11 which assumes that the initiative for the
attacks came spontaneously from the alleged terrorists, while the
US government merely declined to stop them and let 9/11 happen on
purpose. "But," he went on, "based on my
counter-terrorism experience, I am now MIHOP - convinced that top
US government officials made it happen on purpose."
"Remember the Reichstag fire? If Hitler had won the war,
we'd still be blaming Jews and communists for that. On 9/11,
there were other planes ready to target the White House and the
US Capitol. 9/11 was a coup d'état," he concluded.
Shayler also noted that, at least in theory, everything that is
known to the US National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland
is automatically and simultaneously known to the British GCHQ at
Cheltenham, England. The sharing agreement governing this
exchange virtually merges the US and UK intelligence communities,
he pointed out. Shayler also served as master of ceremonies in
Manchester.
The UK Official Secrets Act is one of the most sweeping and
oppressive statutes of its type in the western world. It states
that any official information which has not been officially
released constitutes an official secret, the divulging of which
is a crime. Under this act, any leaker can be packed off to jail
after a trial which is generally stacked against the leaker.
The single Manchester event was held in the city's town hall, a
splendid Gothic revival building designed by the Victorian
architect Pugin, who also designed the Houses of Parliament in
Westminster. The 500 seats were all full. Delegations came to
Manchester from a number of nearby cities, including Leeds and
Wakefield in Yorkshire, the ancestral home of both Shayler and
Tarpley. Many of those who attended were Moslems. Jimmy Walter
announced that he had received requests to bring the 9/11 tour to
Latin America, Africa and eastern Europe. A local Pakistani
businessman was so impressed by the proceedings that he invited
all the speakers for a banquet at his restaurant, which is
considered one of the best eating places in the north of England.
ROME
The Rome events were prepared by full-page ads in Corriere della
Sera (the principal national newspaper of record), the mainstream
Il Messaggero of Rome, and the leftist Il Manifesto, which
employs Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist kidnapped in Iraq
whose rescuer, Nicola Calipari, was assassinated by US forces.
There was also an ad in Leggo, a free Rome paper which circulates
over 1 million copies per day. Attendance at the Rome events was
about 100 each evening, with a DVD screening to follow on
Thursday, June 9. Among those present were several influential
professors, including one who had served on the Italian
Parliament's investigating committee on the terrorist attacks of
1969 and 1980. A representative of the parliamentary press office
was also on hand. The events were held at the Teatro Sala Umberto
in Via della Mercede, close to Palazzo Chigi (residence of Prime
Minister Berlusconi) and also to Montecitorio, the Italian
Chamber of Deputies. A number of Italian political parties sent
representatives. There were complaints about the constant
interference in Italian affairs of neocon extremist Michael
Ledeen. Several Italians pointed in this context to the forged
Niger yellowcake documents, used as pretexts for Bush's Iraq war,
which were foisted on the world in Rome with
the help of rogue Italian intelligence factions.
The master of ceremonies in Rome was the leading Catholic
activist Maurizio Blondet, correspondent for Avvenire, the daily
newspaper of the Italian Catholic Bishops' Conference. Blondet is
the author of at least eight books of alternative political
analysis - known in Italian as controinformazione. Among his
recent titles are Chi comanda in America? (Who Rules the USA?),
Osama Bin Mossad, and La strage dei genetisti, an overview of the
recent world-wide pattern of violent deaths of leading genetics
researchers. Blondet's study entitled 11 settembre: colpo di
stato in USA (September 11: Coup d'état in the USA) would appear
to be the only book on this subject in Italian which completely
repudiates the official version.
Blondet's June 6 speech focused on the post-9/11 anthrax attacks
as an important key to understanding the overall planning and
internal dynamics of these provocations. His June 7 remarks
concerned a series of key anomalies and contradictions in the
Bush regime's 9/11 story which have generally been ignored by
journalists. "I'm probably not the greatest journalist in
the world," said Blondet, "so if I can see through
these fabrications, then many others must also be aware that the
official version of 9/11 is a fake." After the Rome events,
Jimmy Walter was interviewed by La Sette, an important
center-right morning television show, and also by Corriere della
Sera. Maurizio Blondet was scheduled to participate in a debate
on the second program of RAI, the Italian national television.
Parts of the DVD Confronting the Evidence, based on the September
11, 2004 mass meeting at Manhattan Center in New York City, were
scheduled to be shown as a part of that debate.
Organizing committees for the International Truth Commission have
emerged from most of the stops on the tour. Such groupings are
now up and running in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Britain
(London and Manchester), and central Italy (Pisa/Tuscany/Rome). A
Vienna chapter is in the works.
The London and subsequent events were enhanced by technical
assistance by Simon Aronowitz of www.thoughtcrimenews.com, who is
also one of the leading activists on this issue in the UK.
HALFTIME REPORT ON JIMMY WALTER 9/11 EUROTOUR
by Webster G. Tarpley
Madrid
29 May 2005
The Re-Open 9/11 European Tour organized and publicized by
American philanthropist Jimmy Walter – now approaching its
halfway mark – has already scored a significant success in
moving world public opinion on this issue. The tour, which kicked
off in Amsterdam on May 18 and will end in Rome on June 9, takes
two international teams of speakers, plus a documentary film
program, to eight European cities in seven countries. Among the
participants are Canadian television producer and media critic
Barrie Zwicker, French activist Thierry Meyssan, the president of
the Réseau Voltaire, and leading Dutch 9/11 researcher Daan
DeWit, who maintains the daanspeak.com website. Joining them from
the US are Twin Towers hero William Rodriguez, filmmaker Penny
Little, lawyer Philip Berg (who is suing the Bush administration
under the RICO statute), Kennedy assassination author Lisa Pease,
9/11 victim Rachel Hughes, and writers Chris Bollyn, Eric
Hufschmidt, and Webster
Tarpley.
In the kickoff press conference in Amsterdam on May 18, Jimmy
Walter forecast that, because of the increasing political crisis
of the Bush administration, as well as of the looming bankruptcy
of the US government as well as of leading US companies like
General Motors and Ford, we must reckon with new terrorist
actions, prepared with the connivance of US government circles,
before the end of this year. Dismissing the official 9/11
commission report as misleading and worthless, Walter called for
the 9/11 investigation to be re-opened, with Europe playing a
leading role in the
creation of an International Truth Commission on the Events of
September 11, 2001. Walter urged that every effort be made to get
the International Truth Commission up and running this year.
Two evenings of intensive discussion in Amsterdam turned out a
total of about 800 people. Dutch national radio and one of the
main commercial television networks broadcast interviews with
Jimmy Walter, with many press articles also being generated, in
addition to the paid advertising which is going out in every city
on the tour schedule. Daniel DeWit, the most prominent Dutch 9/11
critic, endorsed the International Commission and urged the Dutch
public to join this effort. The Berlin events drew about 200,
with a strong presence of leading journalists like Juergen
Elsaesser, along with 9/11 activists, many of whom committed to
the organizing process for the International Truth Commission.
The Berlin events were held at the Urania, the world’s
oldest institution for popular scientific education. After the
meetings, a group of veteran German activists set up an ad hoc
Berlin committee to help organize the International Truth
Commission.
The two Paris events drew about 550 people. The master of
ceremonies for these events was Thierry Meyssan, who shortly
after 9/11 published his landmark analysis that no commercial
airliner had hit then Pentagon. Meyssan pointed out that as of
now, the only countries in where the official Bush regime account
of 9/11 is untouchable by the mass media are the US, UK, Israel,
and France. He compared French intellectuals who refuse to
challenge Bush’s 9/11 lies to the members of a French
anti-fascist committee of 1936 who refused to accept clear
evidence that the burning of the Berlin Reichstag in 1933 had
been a provocation organized by the Nazis themselves. It was only
around 1960 that academics accepted the truth about the Reichstag
fire. Meyssan paid tribute to Jimmy Walter for helping to
“free the world” from the likes of 9/11 with his
worldwide public education campaigns.
Thierry Meyssan announced a conference to be sponsored by the
Réseau Voltaire in Paris on November 4-5 of this year for the
purpose of defending the concepts of international law and
national sovereignty against the neocon unilateralist campaign,
spearheaded by such figures as John Bolton, to destroy the United
Nations. Meyssan expressed the hope that this conference would be
attended by a broad range of intellectuals from 40 countries, for
all of whom the real history of 9/11 remains an open question.
“Résistons aux mensonges – n’acceptons pas les
mensonges,” said Meyssan in concluding – “Let us
fight the lies, don’t accept the lies.” The 9/11 story
is false, Bush was never elected, the invasion of Afghanistan was
a crime, there never were any weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, he stressed.
The attendance at the Paris events was all the more remarkable
because it coincided with the final phase of the binding French
referendum on the draft European Union constitution, a repugnant
document which would make oligarchy, free trade, and
globalization the basic law of 25 countries. Mass mobilization in
Paris is on the side of rejecting this document, while big money
and big media are attempting to secure its approval in
today’s vote. A June 1 advisory referendum in the
Netherlands, also intersected by the tour, is also likely to
reject the constitution.
In Madrid, Jimmy Walter is scheduled to meet on Tuesday May 31
with families of the victims of the March 11, 2004 train bombings
in this city, which led to a mass mobilization of the Spanish
people and against the politicians who sought to profit from
these tragic events. Then the tour will move on the Vienna, a
nodal point for European relations with the Middle East. In
London and Manchester, the events are being built with the help
of the main UK 9/11 activist groups, including Simon Aronowitz of
Thought Crime News. The Rome meetings will be addressed by
Maurizio Blondet, the Milan journalist who is the author of the
main critical study 9/11 in Italian.
During 2004, Jimmy Walter spent $4.5 million on advertising
critical of the official US 9/11 story, including over 2,000 TV
spots in New York City. He commissioned the famous Zogby
International poll of August 2004 which showed about half of New
York City residents rejecting the official story. Walter’s
DVD of the Manhattan Center 9/11 truth rally of September 11,
2004 is being offered free of charge through the
www.reopen911.org website. A quarter million of these DVDs are
being distributed. Walter has announced another 100,000 DVDs in
the form of subtitled versions in French, German, Italian,
Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese.